Night vision equipment is commonly used by the military when carrying out night operations. However, even with night vision equipment it is oftentimes difficult for ground troops and air support to identify friendly troops as well as objects such as equipment or positions and the like at night.
Infrared flashlights have been used to make it somewhat easier to identify friendly troops at night using night vision equipment. However, infrared flashlights have the objection that they give off a narrow beam of infrared light that can only be seen in one direction through night vision equipment, making it difficult to pick up with night vision equipment. Also such infrared flashlights are very limited in the type of signals that they can emit. Moreover, they are not capable of functioning in an interrogation mode allowing them to be activated remotely by a predetermined signal frequency, code signal or pulse sequence or the like and send out an appropriate signal response.